Thailand

Dialectal Arabic is the primary spoken language used by native Arabic speakers in daily communication. The rise of social media platforms has notably expanded its use as a written language. However, Arabic dialects do not have standard orthographies. This, combined with the inherent noise in user-generated content on social media, presents a major challenge to NLP applications dealing with Dialectal Arabic. In this paper, we explore and report on the task of CODAfication, which aims to normalize Dialectal Arabic into the Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic (CODA). We work with a unique parallel corpus of multiple Arabic dialects focusing on five major city dialects. We benchmark newly developed pretrained sequence-to-sequence models on the task of CODAfication. We further show that using dialect identification information improves the performance across all dialects. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.

ACL 2024

Exploiting Dialect Identification in Automatic Dialectal Text Normalization

dialectal text normalization

dialect identification

arabic

text normalization

workshop paper

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Automatic readability assessment is relevant to building NLP applications for education, content analysis, and accessibility. However, Arabic readability assessment is a challenging task due to Arabic's morphological richness and limited readability resources. In this paper, we present a set of experimental results on Arabic readability assessment using a diverse range of approaches, from rule-based methods to Arabic pretrained language models. We report our results on a newly created corpus at different textual granularity levels (words and sentence fragments). Our results show that combining different techniques yields the best results, achieving an overall macro F1 score of 86.7 at the word level and 87.9 at the fragment level on a blind test set. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.

Strategies for Arabic Readability Modeling

Relational entity extraction is key in building knowledge graphs. A relational entity has a source, a tail and atype. In this paper, we consider Arabic text and introduce evidence enrichment which intuitively informs models for better predictions. Relational evidence is an expression in the text that explains how sources and targets relate. %It also provides hints from which models learn. This paper augments the existing sred relational extraction dataset with evidence annotation to its $2.9$-million Arabic relations. We leverage the augmented dataset to build model, a relation extraction with evidence model from Arabic documents. The evidence augmentation model we constructed to complete the dataset achieved $.82$ F1-score (.93 precision, .73 recall). The target model outperformed SOTA mREBEL with $.72$ F1-score (.78 precision, .66 recall).

AREEj: Arabic Relation Extraction with Evidence

Diacritization plays a pivotal role for meaning disambiguation and improving readability in Arabic texts. Efforts have long focused on marking every eligible character (Full Diacritization). Overlooked in comparison, Partial Diacritzation (`PD`) is the selection of a subset of characters to be annotated to aid comprehension only where needed. Research has indicated that excessive diacritic marks can hinder skilled readers—reducing reading speed and accuracy. We conduct a behavioral experiment and show that partially marked text is often easier to read than fully marked text, and sometimes easier than plain text. In this light, we introduce Context-Contrastive Partial Diacritization (`CCPD`)—a novel approach to `PD` which integrates seamlessly with existing Arabic diacritization systems. `CCPD` processes each word twice, once with context and once without, and diacritizes only the characters with disparities between the two inferences. Further, we introduce novel indicators for measuring partial diacritization quality to help establish this as a machine learning task. Lastly, we introduce `TD2`, a Transformer-variant of an established model which offers a markedly different performance profile on our proposed indicators compared to all other known systems.

A Context-Contrastive Inference Approach To Partial Diacritization

Accurate translation of terminology and adaptation to in-context information is a pillar to high quality translation. Recently, there is a remarkable interest towards the use and the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) particularly for Machine Translation tasks. Nevertheless, despite their recent advancement and ability to understand and generate human-like language, these LLMs are still far from perfect, especially in domain-specific scenarios, and need to be thoroughly investigated. This is particularly evident in automatically translating legal terminology from Arabic into English and French, where, beyond the inherent complexities of legal language and specialised translations, technical limitations of LLMs further hinder accurate generation of text. In this paper, we present a preliminary evaluation of two evolving LLMs, namely GPT-4 Generative Pre-trained Transformer and Gemini, as legal translators of Arabic legislatives to test their accuracy and the extent to which they care for context and terminology across two language pairs (AR→EN / AR→FR). The study targets the evaluation of Zero-Shot prompting for in-context and out-of-context scenarios of both models relying on a gold standard dataset, verified by professional translators who are also experts in the field. We evaluate the results applying the Multidimensional Quality Metrics to classify translation errors. Moreover, we also evaluate the general LLMs outputs to verify their correctness, consistency, and completeness. In general, our results show that the models are far from perfect and recall for more fine-tuning efforts using specialised terminological data in the legal domain from Arabic into English and French.

Large Language Models as Legal Translators of Arabic Legislation: Do ChatGPT and Gemini Care for Context and Terminology?

Zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) systems have advanced for English, however, it still lags behind due to insufficient resources. We address this gap for Arabic, a language of more than 450 million native speakers, by first adapting a sizeable existing dataset to suit the needs of speech synthesis. Additionally, we employ a set of Arabic dialect identification models to explore the impact of pre-defined dialect labels on improving the ZS-TTS model in a multi-dialect setting. Subsequently, we fine-tune the XTTS model, an open-source architecture. We then evaluate our models on a dataset comprising 31 unseen speakers and an in-house dialectal dataset. Our automated and human evaluation results show convincing performance while capable of generating dialectal speech. Our study highlights significant potential for improvements in this emerging area of research in Arabic.

Towards Zero-Shot Text-To-Speech for Arabic Dialects

Speech encoders pretrained through self-supervised learning (SSL) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various downstream tasks, including Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). For instance, fine-tuning SSL models for such tasks has shown significant potential, leading to improvements in the SOTA performance across challenging datasets. In contrast to existing research, this paper contributes by comparing the effectiveness of SSL approaches in the context of (i) the low-resource Spoken Tunisian Arabic Dialect and (ii) its combination with a low-resource SLU and ASR scenario, where only a few semantic annotations are available for fine-tuning. We conducted experiments using many SSL speech encoders on the TARIC-SLU dataset. We used speech encoders that were pre-trained on either monolingual or multilingual speech data. Some of them have also been refined without in-domain nor Tunisian data through a multimodal supervised teacher-student learning. The study made in this paper yields numerous significant findings that we will discuss in the paper.

Performance Analysis of Speech Encoders for Low-Resource SLU and ASR in Tunisian Dialect

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for a wide range of language generation tasks. Nevertheless, this progress has been slower in Arabic. In this work, we focus on the task of generating stories from LLMs. For our training, we use stories acquired through machine translation (MT) as well as GPT-4. For the MT data, we develop a careful pipeline that ensures we acquire high-quality stories. For our GPT-4footnote{GPT-4 refers to GPT-4-0125-preview} data, we introduce crafted prompts that allow us to generate data well-suited to the Arabic context in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and two Arabic dialects (Egyptian and Moroccan). For example, we generate stories tailored to various Arab countries on a wide host of topics. Our manual evaluation shows that our model fine-tuned on these training datasets can generate coherent stories that adhere to our instructions. We also conduct an extensive automatic and human evaluation comparing our models against state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models. Our datasets and models will be made publicly available at url{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/arastories}.

Arabic Automatic Story Generation with Large Language Models

Pre-trained Language Models （PLMs） are integral to many modern natural language processing （NLP） systems. Although multilingual models cover a wide range of languages, they often grapple with challenges like high inference costs and a lack of diverse non-English training data. Arabic-specific PLMs are trained predominantly on modern standard Arabic, which compromises their performance on regional dialects. To tackle this, we construct an Arabic dialectal corpus comprising 3.4M sentences gathered from social media platforms. We utilize this corpus to expand the vocabulary and retrain a BERT-based model from scratch. Named AlcLaM, our model was trained using only 13GB of text, which represents a fraction of the data used by existing models such as CAMeL, MARBERT, and ArBERT, compared to 7.8%%， and 21.3%， respectively. Remarkably, AlcLaM demonstrates superior performance on a variety of Arabic NLP tasks despite the limited training data. AlcLaM is available at: https://github.com/amurtadha/Alclam.

AlclaM: Arabic Dialect Language Model

This paper describes a data augmentation technique for boosting the performance of speech-based diacritic restoration. Our experiments demonstrate the utility of this appraoch, resulting in improved generalization of all models across different test sets. In addition, we describe the first multi-modal diacritic restoration model, utilizing both speech and text as input modalities. This type of model can be used to diacritize speech transcripts. Unlike previous work that relies on an external ASR model, the proposed model is far more compact and efficient. While the multi-modal framework does not surpass the ASR-based model for this task, it offers a promising approach for improving the efficiency of speech-based diacritization, with a potential for improvement using data augmentation and other methods.

Data Augmentation for Speech-Based Diacritic Restoration

We study dependency parsing for four Arabic dialects (Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghrebi). Since no syntactically annotated data exist for Arabic dialects, we train the parser on a Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) corpus, which creates an out-of-domain setting. We investigate methods to close the gap between the source (MSA) and target data (dialects), e.g., by training on syntactically similar sentences to the test data. For testing, we manually annotate a small data set from a dialectal corpus. We focus on parsing two linguistic phenomena, which are difficult to parse: Idafa and coordination. We find that we can improve results by adding in-domain MSA data while adding dialectal embeddings only results in minor improvements.

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Exploiting Dialect Identification in Automatic Dialectal Text Normalization

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